The Classic PC Games You Must Play

To spur our brains into motion, Kotaku has slapped up a listing of “The Classic PC Games You Must Play” that encourages their audience to turn it into “one superlist to unite them all” on the 10+ year-old PC games that everyone should install on their hard drives. There are a lot of really old games that are not represented, but since there are so many RPGs on the list, I can’t help but link to it. I’m going to do something different and quote a couple of user comments, too, since that is where the good info is at:

BloodNet

Why: Vampires and cyberpunk. Cyberpunk and vampires. A lot of reviewers were confused by this Microprose classic adventure role-playing game when it was released way back in 1993. Reviewers were so stupid back then, though it was a pretty unforgiving title. Bad? Parts of it, sure, but the atmosphere and story were awesome. The hero was bitten by a vampire, and only his cyberware is keeping him from turning. Brilliant! It was the perfect convergence of rebellious teenage counterculture in its day. It’s a bit silly now, but then so are we.  

…

DragonStrike

Why: In 1989, Louis Castle invented a 3D virtual environment technology that ran on the Commodore 64. This was a fully functioning flight simulator, where you were on the back of a dragon, fighting other dudes on dragons. This wasn’t “rails” .. this was completely 3D. I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but imagine 1989 using a MOS 6510 1 Mhz processor and 64k bytes of ram and no video card.

I was a tester at Westwood and the game blew my mind. I played it (tested it) for hours and hours… I had never seen anything like it … I would be like bringing back a 60″ LCD screen and bluray dvd player back to 1978 and showing all your friends Star Wars.